Two-Thirds of Recent Chinese College Grads Already Employed

Despite the global economic downturn, a reported 68% of China’s more than six million newly minted college grads have already managed to find employment, according to an announcement by China’s Ministry of Education on Wednesday (report in Chinese here).

China witnessed a record-breaking number of college graduates this year, and policy makers have made finding them jobs a top priority. In total, 4.15 million students from this year’s crop were employed as of July 1, representing nearly half a million more jobs than college graduates reported having at the same time last year, according to the China Youth Daily.

That leaves about two million unemployed college grads to join the ranks of the millions of college graduates from past years who still have not located jobs. The glut in college grads is a result of the expansion in university enrollment in China over the last decade that created a higher-education equivalent of the global credit bubble.

Chinese leaders are keenly aware of the potential perils of millions of disgruntled students. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has encouraged college grads to accept “grassroots” jobs – Communist Party-speak for positions in rural locations that are generally less desired by students – and called on employers to create more jobs.

More than 600,000 college grads have already signed on with government-sponsored employment programs, according to the Ministry of Education. One third of them will reportedly take part in the government’s “rural teaching position program,” designed to reverse the shortage of professional educators in the countryside.

While cities are still the preferred destination for most Chinese college grads, the economic crisis has also increased the appeal of more attainable and less glamorous jobs in smaller towns and villages.

However, given the highly politicized nature of employment figures for the Chinese government, as well as the potential need for some universities to inflate employment numbers to maintain critical scholarship funding, some skeptics have called into question the reliability of official employment statistics. Unconfirmed stories abound on China’s Internet about Chinese universities pressuring jobless graduates to sign phantom “employment agreements” before they are granted a diploma.

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